I'm a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics in the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine. From 2005-2011 I was the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Before joining UMD, I was at The Institute for Genomic Research, where I sequenced the genomes of many bacteria, including those used in the 2001 anthrax attacks. At TIGR I was part of the Human Genome Project and the co-founder of the influenza virus sequencing project (which is when I first learned of the anti-vaccine movement). My research group develops software for DNA sequence analysis, and our (free) software is used by scientific laboratories around the globe. I did my B.A. and M.S. at Yale University, and my Ph.D. at Harvard University, and I have published over 200 scientific papers. Follow me on Facebook or Twitter (@stevensalzberg1), or just subscribe to my alternate blog, http://genome.fieldofscience.com.

Football is corrupting America's universities: it needs to go

(In which I take on the football-industrial complex again.) Big-time college football is no longer a sport. It’s a very expensive entertainment industry with commercial sponsors, big-money television contracts, and highly paid executives. Its proponents have corrupted the mission of almost every university with a large football program, especially those in the NCAA’s top division. It’s time to acknowledge that this large, expensive entertainment business should be expelled from campus.

No, I’m not talking about Penn State. (Not this week, that is. I wrote about Penn State’s scandal in a New York Times forum last week.) This week we have another scandal, which illustrates all too well how football will crush any forces that might try to rein it in, including university presidents. Here’s the scenario:

Hire that new coach for another $2 million, who has now produced a losing season (2 wins, 910 losses), leaving games with even lower attendance than last year.

Because football is still losing money, get rid of 8 other varsity sports.

This is a bad joke, right? No! This is exactly what the University of Maryland just did. Last week, U. Maryland (where I was a professor until this past summer) announced it was eliminating 8 varsity sports teams to make up for the fact that football was losing too much money. I kid you not. Here’s what they are cutting: men’s cross-country, indoor track, outdoor track, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, women’s acrobatics and tumbling, women’s swimming and diving, and women’s water polo.

The president of U. Maryland, Wallace Loh, issued a report that he sent to all students and faculty, describing the tortured reasoning that led to this sorry state of affairs. In it, he illustrates how he and his administration have completely lost sight of their real mission. Poor Dr. Loh: he came into the job only a year ago, with good qualifications to run a major educational institution, but no qualifications to run a football program. After all, why should he?

“In a time of constrained resources, we have to choose: should we have fewer programs so that they can be better supported and, hence, more likely to be successful at the highest level? Or, should we keep the large number of programs that are undersupported compared to their conference peers?”

There you have it. We can’t keep all these programs around if they’re not winning! “Successful at the highest level” – such broken logic, such nonsense from the president of a major university, is almost enough to make me cry. Obviously, Dr. Loh thinks that “successful” means we beat the other schools’ teams. But his own report says that a university’s core mission is “education, research, and the arts.” Did he evaluate these sports teams based on how well the students are educated? No: what matters is whether a team wins.

And of course there’s money: if the football team wins, then the university can make money from oh-so-lucrative television contracts! Dr. Loh acknowledges this:

“If we believe—as I do—that intercollegiate athletics is an integral part of the college educational experience and not only commercialized mass entertainment, then we must come together to reform this financial model …. We have to reset the balance between academics and big-time athletics.”

I’ll say. But despite these nice-sounding phrases, Dr. Loh’s “reform” consists of eliminating eight other varsity teams. Nothing about reigning in football’s costs, and certainly nothing about making sure the players themselves get a good education and have a future after college. This is the essence of how big-time football has corrupted America’s universities. We pay the players nothing, we give them a lousy education (many of them don’t even graduate), and then the university spits them out and moves on.

I’ve heard the cries of protest from football supporters: football makes money! It subsidizes all the other sports! Oddly, even Dr. Loh makes this claim in his report, despite admitting that football at Maryland is losing millions of dollars per year. To this I have two responses:

Fine, let’s suppose that football makes money. Then it will do just fine as an independent business. Get it out of the universities, and let each team pay fees for use of the university’s name, the stadium, practice fields, and parking on game days. Then the football club can pay its coaches whatever it wants, and it can pay the athletes, who are disgracefully paid nothing right now. And the university will still have its team, but without the corrupting influence of money.

So what if football does make money? Since when did universities run an entertainment business? Should they open casinos next?

So get football off our campuses. If athletes want to train for the NFL, let the NFL pay for a minor league, the way baseball does. Universities can have a team if they must, but make it independent, and let’s stop the farce of having university presidents try to manage large, commercial sports programs. Let them get back to focusing on research and education, topics on which they actually have some expertise.

As for the athletes: let them play. They can play football if their studies leave them enough time. If they just want the exercise, they can go out for other sports that provide great physical training and far lower risks of injuries. They can try the track team, or maybe the swim team. Oh, wait….

[Note: for those who will criticize me as a football-hating weenie, I'll have to disappoint you. I grew up watching and loving college ball, before it become so commercialized. My father played varsity football all through college, and he taught me the game in our backyard.]

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The article admits that there is little correlation between football success and academic quality. That would imply that football has no effect (beneficial or “corrupting”) on academics. If the data showed that bad schools had the best football teams, the article could have a point.

I absolutely agree with you that the current system absolutely absurd. It has been absurd for decades, nearly a century. In 1932 the Marx Brother made one of the best movies about the absurdity of college football, “Horse Feathers”. One of the many gags involved “ringers” hired by Darwin College to the big game against Huxley College. The school president the school Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho) decides the hire his own ringers, Pinky (Harpo) and Baravelli (Chico). John Wayne starred in a similar, if less comic movie on the same subject in 1953 called “Trouble Along The Way”. He plays a football couch fired for recruiting violations but lands the job at struggling St. Anthony’s College to start a football program. There he uses every corrupt practice known in the day – and wins the big game!

Zany comedy and movie trivial aside, the point is that movie audiences even in the early 1930′s were well aware of the wide spread corrupt practices of college football which had been going on for some time and by the 1950′s it is clear nothing had changed. Today of course it is even worse.

The solution for however is simply quite the ridiculous charade of these athletes being “amateurs” and “students”. Simply call it what it is, professional football. It would be the equivalent of “minor league” baseball. Let the players earn a salary (and a scholarship) but not have to waste everybody’s time and energy with “attending classes”. If after four or five years they do not get picked up by a “major league” team, which most will not be, they can quite playing, use the scholarship, and actually attend real classes and get a real education. Similarly if they only play a few seasons “in the Show”, which most of the few who do make it to the major leagues do, then they can also go back to school, use that scholarship, and get a real education. The handful that play for many years with great success, well, they can give their scholarship to someone else.

I have long felt that football has become a problem and your article is very insightful. Football sucks the life out of track programs around the country and I am sure it does the same to other sports. Thanks.

Steven: Why stop with football? Great academic programs also corrupt. In 2007 Johns Hopkins University announced that CIT had informed it that the financial aid director at Hopkins, Ellen Frishberg, had been paid $65,000 in consulting fees (some of which helped finance her doctoral program) and $1,200 in travel expenses since 2002.

Mike: what kind of a non sequitur is that? You’re bringing up an unrelated issue from 4 years ago. If you’re saying the student loan industry has problems, then I agree. But this has nothing to do with how universities are corrupted by football.

Steve: it is not a non sequitur. You argument is that football should be banned because it corrupts. Should not all university related activities that corrupt be banned? Where, exactly, do you draw the line?

Total non sequitur. You gave an example of one corrupt official, not of an entire program that was sucking the lifeblood out of the university. Of course that person should be punished. However her activities hardly affected the entire university enterprise. If a program is having a broad negative effect, then yes, I would eliminate it (or move it off campus and make it independent, which is what I’m actually proposing). But your example is not one of those.

Steve: you obviously do not know the definition of non-sequitor so I will provide the standard definitions for you: 1. an inference that does not follow from the premises; specifically : a fallacy resulting from a simple conversion of a universal affirmative proposition or from the transposition of a condition and its consequent. or 2. a statement (as a response) that does not follow logically from or is not clearly related to anything previously said.

Example: We were talking about the new restaurant when she threw in some non sequitur about her dog.

You finally have made your standard for eliminating a program “sucking the lifeblood” and “a broad negative effect.” Very precise. As measured by what? So let’s see, that could means you do not believe in student loans since taxpayers had to eat $2.4 billion in college tuition defaults in 2009. Does that not qualify as “sucking the lifeblood” out of college affordability (less you somehow do not believe subsidies increase tuition rates) or a “broad negative effect?” Women’s basketball at the 53 public schools in the six largest conferences recorded operating losses last fiscal year of $109.7 million, while the men’s teams had operating profits of $240 million, according to their financial records. Should we drop women’s basketball because the programs lose money year after year that could be used to educate students? Or what about the sex scandal at Syracuse involving the men’s assistant coach? Is that not a “broad negative effect?” All those little dots in your chart mean zilch unless you have something to say.

Mike: Regardless of the definition of term, you fail to make an argument that holds water. Correct me if I am wrong, but you argue that because there are other problems with the college system that the author of this article has no right or merit in arguing against the problems with college football. This is a grade school debate tactic that has been used to defend all sorts of things (like slave labor, discrimination, abuse, genocide). There are a lot of problems in the college system, in order for your argument to work you have to admit that there is a problem with college football in its current state.

College football is going to get the most attention because amount of public money that is spent on it. The highest paid public employees in most states are college football coaches. Like most industries, the big dogs gets scrutinized more than the the smaller ones. It’s a fact of life.

Why not reform? No, college football isn’t perfect and could use some shaping up. You claim to not hate football but you seem to be fine with every college sport, except football. Are you sure that it’s not soley the commercialization of the game you have a problem with? Every college athlete has the same type of schedule as a college football player. Some maybe worse considering they play multiple times a week. However, yes, football players do get the most glory and the most advertising money. This whole article seems to be based on something personal (your Maryland experience) rather than any reason.

I couldn’t agree more with this article. There are many arguments against what is going on at Maryland (and what has gone on at other universities), but for now I want to focus on one that I believe predominates over the others: their nonprofit status.

Universities are nonprofit entities and they get many tax benefits and a lot of governmental assistance. Dropping 8 non-revenue sports to make up for the losses brought on by improper management of an athletic department is not something a nonprofit should get away with. Yes, nonprofits should make money and they do need to generate profits to fulfill their purposes, but money should not be the standard by which they measure themselves.

Dropping these programs is a temporary fix to a much bigger problem. Why should a nonprofit such as a university be allowed to discriminate against individuals who were born to run or swim and not play football? This subject was touched when Title IX was put in place. Women weren’t getting an equal opportunity to play sports because their sports didn’t draw the attention or income that male sports did. This isn’t much different.

At their core, universities are about education. But they’re also about much more. Universities strive to foster the growth of diverse atmospheres for students, they provide clubs, organizations, exercise facilities and many other outlets for student involvement, many of which generate no income. Why is this tolerated? Because a university is a nonprofit institution whose purpose goes above and beyond the confines of generating profits.

Look at any college or university that has a law or business school. Every single one of those institutions takes some of the money brought in by those schools and distributes it to the smaller departments (think Classics). Deciding to drop small majors, or majors that don’t make profits, would fly in the face of a university’s purpose, mission, and goals.

Our education system has gone far beyond where it should be. Collegiate sports should be played by students who go to college and play a sport, not students who go to college to play a sport to prepare them for the next level. When universities allow their athletic programs to turn into workhouses whose decisions are made based on the bottom line…they have, in my opinion, violated the terms of their nonprofit status.

Maryland’s proposal/future decision is disgusting because it was made and is argued by selfish individuals who are making decisions based on what’s best for themselves right now; not what’s best for the future of the university, the student body, all athletes, and all sports.